Audely Bensen Writes

I picked up One Dark Window by Rachel Gillig from a B&N sale after three separate writing friends recommended it as a potential comp for the Seaming. Despite the fact that this is a 400 page book, I read this in two days, so the story is definitely captivating. I really liked the balance of tension, world-building, and romance, and I found the ending to be very satisfying, despite the obvious cliffhanger. I will definitely pick up the sequel once it comes out.  I didn't love the epigraphs--they felt a little gimmicky within the card format (especially because it didn't seem like there were words printed on the cards used in the narrative). However, my biggest complaint about this book was the use of the em dash. I counted ten em dashes within the first six pages. I love the em dash--so much so that my writing group has been trying to convince me that I overuse them. After seeing so many em dashes in print, I finally get the point they were trying to make.  

On the recommendation of a coworker with excellent taste in books, I read The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez. It took me five pages to get annoyed with the structure (when is the actual story going to start?) and thirty pages to get completely hooked. After that point, I didn't notice the structure anymore. Jimenez dances between worlds, carrying narratives through time and space, leaving the reader feeling like they're sitting alongside the first narrator in the audience of the Inverted Theater.  This book took me ages to read, and I loved every moment of it. Each scene carried so much weight that I was surprised each time I resurfaced from the book to find I'd only gone a couple pages deeper. Or maybe it was the dancing nature of the narrative that made me read more slowly than normal, as I had to hold more pieces of the story in my head to place each scene and narrator.  I've never read anything else like this before, and I want to read more.